This cover discussion begun by our Janet Mullany on Jan 25 is still intriguing me! I know that what makes a good cover is all really personal preference, but I thought it would be fun to continue the discussion

My position is that a handsome man on a romance cover is going to attract more attention than a cover without a handsome man, even if that cover has beautiful flowers on it.

Now, the handsome man does not have to be without half or all his clothes–those covers, I agree can be embarrassing. (So I guess I’m not really fond of “mantitty” covers, as Janet so cleverly called them), but if I am browsing the romance shelves, not in the market for any specific book, the books I’m going to pick up first are the ones with a handsome man on the cover.

This is why I LOVED my cover for A Reputable Rake. I could not have asked for a better cover, by far my favorite. The Rake is just so handsome and his expression perfectly represents the hero of the book.

My Mills & Boon cover for The Mysterious Miss M comes in a close second, because it had a handsome man in a very romantic pose. As my first book cover ever, I was over the moon about this cover and I still love it.

Now I prefer both of these covers to my cover of Innocence and Impropriety, arriving in bookstores March 2007. This cover has both the handsome man and the romantic pose, but it is a tad too sweet for me, and the book is not quite that sweet. Still, I like this cover. I love the setting of Covent Garden in the background. If it were on the shelf right next to A Reputable Rake, I’d bet A Reputable Rake would be picked up first.

I browsed the All About Romance Cover contest archives for examples. Take a look at these two beautiful Jo Beverley covers (the double image means they are “step back” covers).

They are both wonderful covers, but which would I pick up first? The one with that very handsome man.

My cover for The Wagering Widow was nice because it was provokative and hinted at that handsome man by showing his hand. The black and white image is what you would see just inside the cover, so there was a handsome man and the romantic pose if you opened the book.

The same image appeared on Louise Allen’s Jan 2007 Mills & Boon, Not Quite a Lady.

I cannot be objective, though. I don’t know which I would pick up first, if they were side by side, Not Quite a Lady, with its handsome man in a romantic pose, or the provokative, A Wagering Widow?

What do you all think?
Does a handsome man on the cover influence whether you will pick it up, at least to read the back cover copy?

Do you want to vote for a favorite cover? Cover Cafe has a contest, formerly sponsored by All About Romance!

Speaking of handsome men on romance covers, in March, the cover model for The Wagering Widow and Not Quite a Lady, Richard Cerqueira, will be doing a guest interview with Risky Regencies. So let me know if there is anything you would like me to ask Richard about what it is like in a romance cover shoot.

Cheers!
Diane

I meant to do this earlier in the day. Megan could not do the blog today so I volunteered but then I spent the day FINALLY finishing the revisions to The Vanishing Viscountess.

I promised my system for naming characters.

The Regency period was a more formal time than nowadays when everyone from salesclerks to telemarketers want to use your first name. First names were rarely used in the Regency era, except among family or schoolmates. Even so, a little boy with a title would be called by his title, even if he was a mere toddler. Think of it, in Pride & Prejudice no one ever called Darcy Fitzwilliam! and Mr. and Mrs. Bennet addressed themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet.

I’ve tried to adapt to this style in my books, so I pay attention first to title names and surnames. I make sure my male characters have title names or surnames that will sound comfortable as what we modern folk would think of as given names. So in my March book, Innocence & Impropriety, the hero is Jameson Flynn, but he is “Flynn” throughout the book. His employer is the Marquess of Tannerton or “Tanner” to everyone. (Tanner is the hero of The Vanishing Viscountess)

I often create title names by using The Incomplete Peerage . But I mix up the title names, taking the stem from one of them and putting on a different ending, so “Cornwall” may become “Cornworth.” Then I google “Lord Cornworth” to make certain there isn’t a real one.

My heroines are much more apt to get a first name. Have you noticed how my heroine names mostly start with “M”? My daughter’s name starts with M.

For first names I go to a baby naming site and look up English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh first names, whatever I need. Or I go to a census of the time period and see what names are there. I do this for surnames as well.

I try not to repeat a letter of the alphabet in the book, so if the hero is Tanner, then his butler would not be Turner.

That’s it. That’s my naming style. And if that doesn’t work, I just take a name from a reader–Right Mallory? Mallory Pickerloy is my heroine in The Vanishing Viscountess.

Diane

I promised my editor I would have my revisions to The Vanishing Viscountess to her today and I really slacked off over the weekend. So no time to give you one of my brilliant, exquisitely planned and executed blogs (Who’s laughing?????). I am, therefore going to give you a stream of consciousness blog–don’t look for any unifying theme!

Did you know we authors love to know readers enjoyed our books? Now is your chance to tell us!

EHarlequin is in the nomination stage for its 2006 Readers Choice Awards. Click Here to nominate your favorites. I’m honored to say that my A Reputable Rake by Diane Gaston is mentioned under Favorite Historical and under Sexiest Hero on a Cover. Eventually there will be voting, I think, so keep watching.

All About Romance is also tabulating Reader Favorites and this time you can vote! Reputable Rake is there too, under Best Buried Treasure. Titles are starting to be eliminated and I’d LOVE for Reputable Rake to make it to the final round. So please vote for Reputable Rake for Best Buried Treasure and vote for your other favorites, too. There are plenty of Regencies to choose from and I think you can still add additional choices.
Start here to see who’s been nominated and eliminated so far.
http://www.likesbooks.com/interim2006.html#secondinterim
Go here to vote:
http://www.likesbooks.com/ballotannualpoll.html

Do you know of any other sites doing Reader Favorites?

Speaking of EHarlequin, my friend Melissa James has an online read there now, called The Homecoming. It isn’t Regency but it is a fun read. Melissa writes for the new Harlequin Romance line, the merge of the Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Romance lines. You’ll find Melissa’s story HERE

Speaking of The Vanishing Viscountess, the book of my revisions. It is scheduled for release in early 2008. I believe I have lamented before about this being a “road story.” The coolest thing, though. My son who is studying Geography and Mapping in college is going to do an online map of the places in this book! I’m not exactly sure how he’ll do it, but I’ll have it on my website eventually!

In my husband’s channel surfing he came upon a Japanese film with this premise: “A noblewoman agrees to sleep with a cassanova if he succeeds in seducing a chaste widow.” Wow, I thought. What a great premise. Then I realized it was the premise for Dangerous Liaisons. A day or so later, more channel surfing and he discovers the movie, Valmont also based on the same book as Dangerous Liaisons and released only one year later. It is pre-French Revolution, not Regency, but Valmont stars a young and almost impossibly handsome Colin Firth. Naturally I had to watch it. How’s that for synergy?

Have any of you seen Valmont?

Speaking of impossibly handsome men, it is only 44 more days until the release of the movie 300!

Cheers!
Diane

Okay. I confess. I have a googlealert on my own name. Well, on Diane Perkins, Diane Gaston—and Gerard Butler. A google alert sends a message to your email anytime something new comes up on whatever topic you select. As you can see, I’ve selected three of my favorite topics for this service!

This week Diane Gaston popped up on my googlealert email, and I discovered that my RITA winner, A Reputable Rake, is an ebook! Harlequin has bundled A Reputable Rake with Nicola Cornick’s The Rake’s Mistress and Georgina Devon’s The Rake into an ebook available for order on eHarlequin and other ebookstores such as Fictionwise. It is called Rapturous Rake Bundle.

I’m delighted to enter the ebook market! A number of years ago I saw an ebook reader that intrigued me and made me feel that there would be a strong future for books in this format. Since then the market has grown. You might even say it provided the impetus for an entirely new romance subgenre – Erotic Romace – when Ellora’s Cave burst on the scene.

Many of us would never want to give up books, the feel of them, the smell of them, the sight of them three deep in our bookcases and piled next to our beds. When I see kids playing on their Game Boys (or whatever the “in” handheld game device is now), my own young adult offspring with their new IPods, and young career men and women with their Blackberries, I think that maybe ebooks will be the preferred way of publishing books in the future.

One idea I heard was to put textbooks on electronic reading devices. What a great thing that would be! Our high school and college students, even elementary school student, would not need to carry fat backpacks. Think of all the trees we would save! And one would hope that the cost of such books would decrease. Think of the innovations one could add to textbooks — short videos, animated diagrams, sound.

Most things I’ve read on the issue of ebooks say that there is still not an affordable, user-friendly
device on which to download books. Let’s face it, the IPod screen is a little small and even that device isn’t exactly inexpensive.

I haven’t yet read an ebook, but there is one on my TBR pile. My friend Delle Jacobs‘ His Majesty The Prince of Toads (A Regency!) is my first ebook download and I’m eager to read it!

Ebooks tend to have very long shelf life so an author’s backlist is readily available and ebook publishers often publish books that don’t fit a typical print publishing niche.

So, have you read any good eBooks lately?
Do you hate the idea of eBooks or are you a little bit intrigued?

To set up a google alert of your very own, go here:
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en

And this is why I google Gerard Butler! Here he is on the set of 300, due for release in March!

Cheers!
Diane

Kalen’s comment on Friday about being tired of Regency spies got me to thinking.

What Regency plots are readers tired of?

One of the things that strikes terror into my heart is the idea that the Regency genre might run out of plots. For example, one of the tried and true Regency plots is the lord and the governess plot. You know, the spunky governess comes to care for the lord’s unruly children and winds up married to the lord. I love that plot. I have a whole book with such a plot in my head, but I doubt that any publisher would buy it in today’s market. Unless I could give it a great twist. Maybe not even then.

Several of my plots have been “Marriage of Convenience” plots – The Mysterious Miss M, The Wagering Widow, The Improper Wife, The Marriage Bargain. Obviously that is another plot I’m fond of. Are readers sick of that one? When I first wrote The Mysterious Miss M editors said that readers would never accept a prostitute heroine, but now it seems like there are lots of Regencies out there with prostitute or courtesan heroines. Did the readers change or were those editors simply mistaken? And was it my heroine who made that book popular or was it because I used that marriage of convenience plot?

I always wondered if the traditional Regency lines were hampered by overuse of some of the popular plots – the marriage of convenience, governess and lord, unmarried duke and the ingenue in her first season, bookish spinster and debauched rakehell. What are some others?

Ironically, though, I started reading fewer traditional regencies when they started to widen the plots into suspense, mystery, paranormal. Were other readers saturated by the “traditional” plots or did they miss them, like I did?

Presently I read very few regency-set novels, but it is because I’m afraid of contaminating my fragile muse. I’m afraid I’ll either mimic others’ great ideas or I’ll be struck wordless by others’ creativity….

After I finish writing my next Harlequin Mills & Boon and my next Warner, I’ll have to seriously think about these issues. I have a fledgling Regency plot floating around in my head. It has a bit of paranormal in it, but by the time I get to writing those books, will the appetite for paranomal be satiated?

Do other Regency writers worry about such things or is it just me? I’m always afraid I will never have another story idea….

Writing Regency romance is my passion, though. I don’t ever want to stop. How do we keep the Regency genre fresh? Is it by reinventing the tried and true plots or by expanding the genre into new directions? Will the Regency ever lose its position as a popular time period in romance? Gosh I hope not!

So, tell me… What Regency plots are you tired of? Which ones do you never get tired of? Do you like it when Regency spreads itself into other genres? And, last of all, do you think the Regency genre is here to stay?